When and How to Pay a Blogger
Tread Carefully When It Comes to This Delicate Practice
When my colleague Sean Corcoran and I researched this topic, we realized that this practice, which we call "sponsored conversation," is here to stay. Some bloggers are journalists and some others act like journalists -- those will adhere to tight ethical standards on gifts. Other bloggers will take money to write anything and have no credibility -- you don't want to pay them, since no one believes them.
But there's a whole class of people now with a following: bloggers who just write what they believe. Mommy bloggers like Jessica Smith, for example. These bloggers are already reviewing products in exchange for loans or donations of sample products. Bloggers gotta eat, too. Should they take cash to write about products? Should you pay them?
If you don't want to lose your job -- and if you want to retain any credibility -- you should move forward very carefully here. We strongly recommend that you heed these key elements of the FTC rules:
- Advertisers must disclose "material connections" between themselves and their endorsers that might "affect the weight of credibility of the endorsement" (i.e., if you compensate or pay in any way, you must disclose that).
- Endorsements by bloggers must "reflect honest opinions, findings, beliefs or experience" of the endorser.
- Both the marketer and the blogger can be held liable for misleading or false statements made by the blogger about the brand.
But do it right, and you can get people with a following writing about you in their own voice -- a powerful persuasive force. As Sean noted in his recent post, the key here is transparency and authenticity. Here's an excerpt of our recommendations:
Know the rules and educate everyone involved. Before you even think of dipping your toe in the water you will need to familiarize yourself with all of the necessary rules, including the existing FTC guidelines, the proposed updates to those guidelines and Google's policy on the use of no-follow links. Also take note that other countries such as the U.K. have have stringent policies on this subject as well. Get legal involved upfront and make sure anyone working on it is educated on the subject.
Mandate absolute disclosure and transparency. We have preached this from the beginning as it is by far the most important rule. The FTC's guidelines are clearly about deterring deceptive advertising, a practice you shouldn't be involved in anyway. Make sure any and all bloggers you work with make it VERY clear to their audience that your brand is involved in the development of the content. If you fail to do this you will put yourself at risk for not only a bad PR mess but legal trouble as well.
Ensure authenticity. You must allow bloggers to speak freely and authentically -- not just because the FTC requires it but because credible reviews are better for your business. Just as consumers find product reviews on e-commerce sites more credible when negative reviews are included, consumers will find reviews about your products more credible when the reviewer is allowed to speak about it in their own voice. This is the real power of working with bloggers -- to get them to talk freely about your brand with their community, not to use them as a megaphone to spin your message. If you're not comfortable letting go of your brand then sponsored conversations aren't for you (and you may want to revisit your overall social media strategy).
I don't expect all you gentle readers to agree with this -- it's too controversial a topic. But paying bloggers is here to say. So if you do it, do it right.
~ ~ ~
Josh Bernoff is the co-author of "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," a comprehensive analysis of corporate strategy for dealing with social technologies such as blogs, social networks and wikis, and is a VP-principal analyst at Forrester Research. He blogs at blogs.forrester.com/groundswell.
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Those who want to be taken seriously and retain their credibility (both on the brand AND blogger side) need to establish standard ethical practices. I think it's appropriate that the FTC guidelines assign responsibility to the advertiser and the publisher...as it should be
For BlogHer, our policies focus on three things:
1. Disclosure
2. Clear physical separation of editorial and advertorial
3. Context
We outlined what are policies are, how we execute them, and why we set them in this post:
http://www.blogher.com/baby-mammoths-and-baby-industry-how-blogher-separates-editorial-advertising
The goal, in the end, is to provide value to the advertiser, while safeguarding the blogger-reader relationship. We think it can be done.
You summed it up pretty concisely: "the key here is transparency and authenticity"... Whether it's the blogger, the agency responsible for connecting the company & the blogger, or the company itself - those 2 elements are critical.
I wish someone would take the time tho to focus on the real purpose behind the FTC guideline revisions: those who are intentionally using the 'blog format' to push scams. Sites like this: http://dropweightfast.com/ (found using Google search acai+berry+colon) are the reason that the FTC regulation is needed. Because there are people scamming individuals out of money using a "fake blog format" to get their money. Because the average person isn't going to pursue a lawsuit for losing $50-100 on a scame - but the FTC needs to be able to go after these con artists on behalf of the average consumer.
1. In a 140 characters this person is able to gladly extol the virtues of their Ford Fiesta
2. They are able to escape having to claim ("Hey, by the way, if you're new to this stream this is a paid advertisement!") the impetus for the tweet
3. The hash tag itself, which I assume is their way of telling their corporate sponsor that they're promoting their product, takes up a large percentage of that tweet, thus, the ability to tell people you wouldn't be talking about a Ford vehicle if it weren't for this donation is limited.
How about a #pdreview for each paid tweet. Ethical people who want to be transparent about it will comply. Those who don't, will not and will be exposed.
There are probably plenty of people who will still read a paid review, especially for the people who are currently transparent. Probably won't affect them at all.
What do others think?
- This is obviously a scam.
- This is the person's opinion, unswayed by any payment.
- This is the preson's opinion, but they wrote the post after receiving payment.
So work with bloggers with the understanding that they'll let everyone know it's the the third.
I don't see why there is any distinction between giving something of value (e.g. use of a car for 6 months) vs. direct payment. That's not where to draw the line. Presence or absence of disclosure and authenticity are where to draw the line.
At IZEA we have pioneered standardized, machine readable disclosure through our disclosure badges on SocialSpark. Our system machine validates disclosure in each post and every blogger that participates discloses in the same way. These machine readable disclosures allow us to provide the advertiser with a disclosure audit and compliance with FTC guidelines.
http://izea.com/disclosure-audit/
"EXAMPLE 4: A well-know celebrity appears in an infomercial for an oven roasting bag that purportedly cooks every chicken perfectly in thirty minutes. During the shooting of the infomercial, the celebrity watches five attempts to cook chickens using the bag. In each attempt, the chicken is undercooked after thirty minutes and requires sixty minutes of cooking time. In the commercial, the celebrity places an uncooked chicken in the oven roasting bag and places the bag in one oven. He then takes a chicken roasting bag from a second oven, removes from the bag what appears to be a perfectly cooked chicken, tastes the chicken, and says that if you want perfect chicken every time, in just thirty minutes, this is the product you need. A significant percentage of consumers are likely to believe the celebrity's statements represent his own views even though he is reading from a script. The celebrity is subject to liability for his statement about the product. The advertiser is also for misrepresentations made through the endorsement."
It's just the Spamola of Blogola. Of course I'm in favor of ethical disclosure, but that's not gonna happen in the web marketplace.
A fun diversion is to ask, at what point do you seriously begin to apply the ethics rules? Do you look at the largeness of the compensation given to the paid blogger, as in automobile vs. a $0.50 Hit on MTurk? Do you look at the cost or value or impact of the item / service / opinion being positively (or negatively) blogged about?
Why is there concern about ethical disclosure in blogs at this time? Have we agreed that NYT and BG and DP and LAT are all the horses we should shoot, leaving only blogs as the new factual totems, trustworthy authorities on anything from products to political opinions?
Thanks
Patrick Houlahan
VP Business Development
www.AdJack.tv
Hardly new. That group's been around long before the PayPerPost crowd ever showed up.
I beleive the issue is real, but it exists beyond the blogsphere FTC needs to take a broader view and ask for transparency in all venues. They will be doing everyone a favor as blogger reviews will become less than worthless to advertisers if they fall under a black cloud. I wrote more about this issue on my site at http://mcmilker.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/the-ftc-has-it-right-%E2%80%93-agencies-have-it-wrong-on-paid-product-reviews/
Good topic!
Best,
Gunther Sonnenfeld
http://www.twitter.com/goonth
http://www.welcometonow.blogspot.com
Chris Brogan read one of my posts and left a really good comment, and actually went back to his own blog and added a disclosure as a result of reading mine:
http://www.mizzinformation.com/2009/05/wheres-line-between-blogging-and.html
If nothing else, this whole debate is inspiring a lot of great thoughts, posts and comments.
Amanda Vega
http://www.amandavega.com
http://FreeAcaiBerry.org